the thought

Kathleen Destino

It’s a whole new spin on TV dinners, people. Burning the pages of the monthly Mediaweek http://www.mediaweek.com magazine that gets dropped off on my desk, was a short article about restaurants offering personal televisions and Internet access at their tables.

Remember when TV dinners used to be frozen fried chicken and mashed potatoes that families ate on TV trays in front of their favorite Cosby, Family Ties or Full House episode?

Now, apparently, TV dinners are coming directly to a restaurant near you.

The Mediaweek article says that “one in four people say they would watch a small TV while seated at their favorite table service restaurant, and 27 percent say they would have no problem cracking open their laptops if wireless Internet access was available.” I don’t know how everyone else feels, but my intuition tells me this doesn’t seem like the best idea dreamed up by marketers.

Does it make sense for a restaurant to drive people out of their home to spend money at a place that offers them exactly what their home offers? Isn’t part of the “going out to eat” experience getting out of your home, away from your TV, turning off the email and chatting with a friend, relative or spouse?

As a society, we tend to view eating as accomplishing one of two things.
1) Consuming calories, and consuming as many as possible as fast as possible
or
2) Social hour – we’ve been doing this since the grade school cafeteria

So, this TV and Internet idea might be counterintuitive for a couple of reasons. The first being the nature of restaurants, especially in the quick service or casual dining realm. Restaurants want to turn tables. They want you to eat and leave so the next party can sit down. It’s one way they make more money.

I recently heard that one local Denver restaurant actually told their staff NOT to offer dessert. If they offer dessert, the cost of the dessert did not compare to the cost of a whole new table sitting down. Get ‘em in and get ‘em out seemed to be this restaurant’s philosophy. On the same token, customers want to eat and move on. We are not a similar society to Europeans, who can make the dinner hour last for three or more hours and still be at total peace.

If you introduce a television or Internet connection, the customer is probably going to linger longer. They may sip their Diet Coke a little slower or order another round of French fries, but they probably are not going to continue running up a tab (unless you have alcohol and that is a whole other blog). In addition, while the customer lingers at a Village Inn http://www.villageinn.com/ watching a personal TV, a Denny's http://www.dennys.com/en/ commercial might be shown on the program they are watching, and any marketer can see the danger zone that this is leading to.

The second reason is that those that go out to eat for social reasons and to get away from their television and Internet connection are not going to be pleased when they sit down at their table and it is staring them straight in the face. Talk about hitting where it hurts. The concept completely contradicts their expectation.

So, either the TV stays out of the restaurant or the nature of restaurants has to change. Out of necessity, restaurants would have to go from being a function of fulfilling a need – calories or social time – to being that of a “home away from home”. Perhaps like a Starbucks – comfy chairs, nice aromas, laptops, but with burgers, French fries, pizza, ketchup, noodles, pasta sauce the list goes on. I’m just not picturing it.